The funny thing is that a basic understanding of the Bible is actually important for making sense of American history - the people making that history were strongly influenced by the Bible and so unless you know at least the major “plot points”, their actions (and a lot of literature) won’t make much sense.
With that said, I don’t trust Oklahoma to teach about the Bible in a manner appropriate for historical analysis rather than religious dominance.
the Catholic Church is their competition when it comes to running private schools and otherwise lucrative community support institutions
I generally agree with what you’ve written, but I think you’re assuming more pragmatism here than is actually present. Bitter hostility between Protestants and Catholics is as old as Protestantism (and much older than the institutions you mention).
Also, as a side note, there are plenty of Catholic Republicans. (37% vs 44% that identify as Democrats, according to Pew.)
I should clarify. I’m not saying that most people who distrust the justice system are going to like Trump more after his conviction. I’m also not saying that I think he’s likely to reform the justice system in a way that helps people affected by racial bias.
However, many of Trump’s supporters consider his conviction evidence that he’s genuinely an anti-establishment candidate rather than proof of wrong-doing. (See the variety of “I’m voting for the convicted felon” merchandise.) This attitude requires a distrust of the justice system. We’ve already seen that Trump’s conviction hasn’t hurt his poll numbers very much and that he currently has more black support than he did in '16 or '20 so I’m saying that his conviction might actually lead to a small increase in support for him from black people (the majority of whom are still never going to support him) because more of them distrust the justice system.
No, I’m saying that we know black people are less likely to trust the police than white people are, and so it seems reasonable that they might also trust the courts less too. That doesn’t imply some supervillain-like love of crime.
I wonder if there’s actually some truth to his claim. The experience of blacks with the justice system is quite different than that of whites, so I wouldn’t be surprised if their attitude towards a candidate with felony convictions would also be different. Perhaps they’re more likely to believe the narrative of an unfair prosecution than white people are.
I don’t know if I would call this ruling a mistake since I’m not an expert in matters of standing, but I regret that the court will not act against a serious threat to free speech. Members of both parties have made statements directed at social media companies which I consider well over the line between a request and a threat.
When I bought my Windows 11 laptop a month ago, I was able to set up a local account after turning on airplane mode. (I had entered my wifi password in an earlier step since I thought it was just for installing updates.)
I have no idea why the USA spends money on training international students until they get their PhD and then doesn’t automatically give them permanent residency. One guy I know came from Iran to get his physics PhD and although he has managed to stay in the USA with a work visa, by default the USA would have sent him back to Iran!
I spent those years in dll hell.
People seem to hold computers to a higher standard than other people when performing the same task.
For journalists, it raises a question: Should a public official’s family be held to the same standards as that official themselves?
Bullshit. It raises the question: Should a Supreme Court Justice be believed unconditionally when he offers an excuse for what really looks like inappropriate bias? The discovery that another flag associated with the January 6 attack flew in front of Alito’s beach house has shown that the NYT was correct not to accept his story about his wife. I’m honestly surprised by the discussion of how a judge’s family is expected to behave - it’s as if a dead body was found in Alito’s house, he said that he had no idea how it got there, and the press started talking about whether or not he had a responsibility to monitor access to his property more closely.
I had a lot of fun watching Edge of Tomorrow.
Their problem:
So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock
The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.
It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.
As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.
The dolphin was diagnosed only a few weeks ago, but it died over two years ago in March 2022.
This claim that the frozen embryos should be considered children according to Texas law has been thrown out repeatedly by Texas courts. It’s almost certainly not going anywhere.
It’s easy to act self-righteous when that has no consequences, but in practice most people on this planet live in countries (including democratic countries) that probably would actually kill the children in an analogous scenario.
If you present me with a trolley problem in which the only way to destroy Hamas also kills a million children, I won’t know what the right answer is. I suppose it would depend on what would happen to Israel if Hamas wasn’t destroyed.
However, the moral calculus for nations is not the same as it is for individuals. The standard established the last time the Western world fought a war it took seriously does seem to be “as many as it takes” and I suspect that this would still be the standard if such a war happened again. (All those nuclear missiles we have ready aren’t precise weapons…) In that context, demanding that Israel should show restraint that other countries haven’t and wouldn’t seems like hypocrisy.
If you trust the casualty numbers that the UN Is using, then they imply approximately 3.7 civilians killed for every combatant (with the assumptions that children make up half the population and that children are never combatants). I don’t trust those numbers but I admit that if I did, I would think they didn’t look good for Israel. I suppose we’ll have a better idea of what the truth is years from now when historians reach a consensus, but until then I’m going to reluctantly trust Biden’s judgement because the US government probably has secret information unavailable to the public. (Biden is biased by his need to be re-elected, but I don’t get reports from the CIA so that’s the best I can do.)
As for justification: Israel should make reasonable efforts to minimize civilian casualties while accomplishing its legitimate military objectives, but Israel should not sacrifice its ability to accomplish those objectives in order to protect civilians. In other words, Hamas doesn’t get to hold Palestinian civilians as hostages against Israel. If they try, then they are to blame for the resulting civilian casualties. The alternative is simply unworkable in practice, because the ability of Hamas to put Palestinian civilians at risk is almost total.
I think that this is an attempt at a joke rather than something he actually did. He probably enjoys reading about how angry his political opponents are about it.
I’ve seen a mailer providing false information that a certain very liberal group (out-of-state college students) wasn’t allowed to vote, but I’ve never seen something like this. Do you have a link to an example of it?